Saturday, April 4, 2015

I saw Justin's recent post on Alpha Clock Five and I just couldn't resist not to try it myself too. Since I didn't have that clock, I thought of improvising one by making a 5-character display that would plug into my Wise Clock 4 board. The idea was easy, the implementation not so. After many hours of hand-wiring, this is how it looks like.

The displays are 1" single digit alphanumeric (common anode) from sparkfun, now retired. They came with non-functional dots, probably the reason they were less than $2 each.
The spacing between the individual displays is forced by the protoboard.

The 2 boards are connected through the pairs of 2x8 headers. All pins used by Alpha Clock 5 to drive the displays are wired to the unused header on the Wise Clock 4 board.

Not to mention that the software compilation and upload worked without any glitch (after downloading the very nice DS1307RTC library)

The only regret is that this clock lacks seconds. One extra display would have added lots of extra value, but probably lacked the cool factor (the "6-letter clock" requires a lot more memory to store all 6-letter words than the approx 50k required by the 5-letter-word collection).